Homily for the Feast of St. Luke
Commemorated October 11, 2009
Grace Episcopal Church, Yorktown, VA
Dr. Barbara Allison-Bryan

The Appointed Lessons for the Feast of St. Luke
Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:1-4,6-10,12-14
Psalm 147
2 Timothy 4:5-13
Luke 4:14-21

God's works will never be finished; and from him health spreads over all the earth.

Like every medical student, I was assigned an adviser. I met with him the very first day of school. Not long into the conversation, he asked me, "What are you most worried about?" I thought that the answer to that was fairly predictable and probably fairly universal. I answered, "I will never be able to learn everything that I need to know to save someone's life." Dr. Graham smiled. "Saving lives will be no problem for you. That's the easy part. You will know that you are a real physician when you can help someone face death."

Wow. I had not come to medical school to help people face death. I was 21 and eager to save the world, or at least my little part of it. While I do not think that I was so naive as to deny the reality of death, I just had never thought that facing death would be the measure of my success. In fact, I suspect I thought the opposite: if my patient died, I have failed.

I would not have been alone in that thinking. The medical mindset of most Americans is that disease is something to be identified, conquered, obliterated, and beaten. Doctors are to prevent it, explain it, and eradicate it. Just think about swine flu. We mask, we glove, we vaccinate, we talk, we hype, we sneeze into our elbows. And we keep score of how many people have died, each one a medical failure. We did not do enough soon enough,

Well, I did graduate from medical school. I have had a hand in some significant cures. But I have tried not to forget what it might mean to be a real physician.

Luke, most agree, was also a physician. The evidence isn't overwhelming, but it is fairly good. In Colossians 4 there is a reference to "Luke the beloved physician" who traveled with Paul and most agree that the language that Luke used would be characteristic of a doctor. Through the centuries bible-readers have considered Luke to be a physician.

But while I am speaking now simply because I am a physician, Luke did not write because he was one. If he had, he might have left us a medical treatise on how fever or bleeding or tumors were managed in the first century. Instead, Luke left us his gospel and the Book of Acts. He left 60 stories of healing at the touch or sight or word of an itinerant sage named Jesus and the story of a fledgling church. Why? I did not leave the practice of medicine to be here.

Jesus physically cured the sick. The crippled walked. The blind could see. Epileptics stopped seizing. And though it's not recorded by Luke, Lazarus lived again and partied heartily with his sisters Martha and Mary. But Jesus' patients, despite their short-term respite from illness and for Lazarus death, in the long run did no better than 21st century patients do. His patients died.

That does not matter to Luke and it certainly did not matter to Jesus. Cure was sacramental for Jesus. It was an outward and visible sign of some thing more true than the truth. Cure was the easy part. When Jesus looked at his patient, or spoke to his patient, or touched his patient each knew peace, hope, and the presence of God. That is healing in a nutshell: an awareness of the presence of God.

That sort of healing one to another is not only possible for us, it is expected. Luke wrote that Jesus sent his disciples out to preach and to heal,

I may be speaking today because I am a physician, but I am here, now, in this room because of you. In your faces, in your words, in your prayers, in your touch at the peace, you make me aware of the presence of God. And you heal me. At this table with a morsel of bread and a sip of wine, I know the presence of God, and I am healed. We can bring an awareness of the presence of God to one another when we worship or in friendship or in visiting the sick, the friendless and the needy. When we do we are healers and what ever our vocation, we are real physicians. When my patients face illness or even death aware of the presence of God, they are healed and I am a true physician. When that happens, Dr. Graham and Luke and Jesus have done their jobs well.

God's works will never be finished; and from him health spreads over all the earth.